The German Foreign Ministry has reacted to the US State Department’s accusations of oppression of democracy in the FRG – over the recognition of the Alternative for Germany party as a right-wing extremist party.
“This is democracy. This decision is the result of a thorough and independent investigation to protect our Constitution and the rule of law. It is the independent courts that will have the final say. We have learnt from our history that right-wing extremism must be stopped,” the German foreign ministry wrote online x.
Earlier, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio condemned the German constitutional decision.
“Germany has just given its intelligence service new powers to spy on the opposition. This is not democracy, but disguised tyranny. What is truly extremist is not the popular Alternative for Germany party, which came second in the recent elections, but rather the establishment’s deadly open-borders immigration policy, which Alternative for Germany opposes,” Rubio said on the X network.
The Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution of the Federal Republic of Germany had earlier classified the Alternative for Germany party as a” convinced right-wing extremist organisation”-because of the extremist nature of the entire party, which disregards human dignity, the office said in a press release.
The federal office has been working on the evaluation of the party for months, but it has so far been assessed at the federal level under the category of “suspicion of right-wing extremism”. The status granted now means that the entire party is considered unconstitutional, Der Spiegel explains. This lowers the barriers to intelligence surveillance of the party and allows for tapping phones and recruiting informants, the newspaper says.
In late February, early elections to the Bundestag were held in Germany, in which the Alternative for Germany came second, receiving a record number of votes in its history (the first place went to the conservative CDU/CSU bloc). The head of the CDU/CSU bloc, Friedrich Merz, who will become the new Chancellor of Germany, refused to cooperate with the right-wing party in forming a coalition.